Plant Shutdown Quotes

the technicians of NIKIET believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid. And they thought that such an immediate shutdown would be necessary only in the extremely unlikely event of a total loss of external power to the plant. So they designed the AZ-5 system to only gradually reduce the reactor’s power to zero.

Despite initial enthusiasm from Page’s distributors, as an overall category, innerwear remained a low-profile product in retail stores. This would ultimately necessitate a high-pitched, pan-India advertising campaign from Page, but the costs were prohibitive. Competitive intensity from incumbents had already increased substantially during 1995–2000. When the company reached sales of Rs 21 crore in FY2000, Rupa and Maxwell were already at Rs 150 crore each. One level above them, in the mid-premium segment, brands like Liberty, Libertina and Tantex (TTK Tantex) were firmly ensconced. Associated Apparels (Liberty and Libertina) reported sales of Rs 100 crore during the same period. In a stroke of luck for Page, both TTK Tantex and Associated Apparels fell prey to labour strikes. TTK Tantex saw labour-related plant shutdowns in 1997 that lasted for two years, sending the company’s revenues into a steady descent (see Exhibit 55). The TTK Group had twenty companies across many sectors and, due to lack of management bandwidth to handle the crisis, sold the innerwear brand in FY02. In the same year, Associated Apparels had a labour strike in one of its factories that disrupted its supply chain. The exit of both TTK Tantex and the crippling of Associated Apparels played into Page’s hands as all the large innerwear retailers (dealers) in northern and western India shifted to Jockey.

In 1979 the nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, experienced a temporary shutdown when the reactor core overheated and almost caused a meltdown. The near disaster was well reported. Left largely unreported was the aftermath: livestock on nearby farms aborted and died prematurely, and households experienced what amounted to an epidemic of cancer, birth defects, and premature deaths.17 The aftereffects of Three Mile Island remain one of America’s best kept secrets.

Sometimes the elite green gospel has proved catastrophic—especially for the middle classes. In August and September 2020, high winds, lightning strikes, and scorching temperatures caused hundreds of forest fires throughout California. Past “more natural” policies had discouraged controlled burning, removal of brush from forest floors, cattle grazing on hillsides of dead undergrowth, and the logging of tens of millions of dead trees lost during recent droughts. Even the emasculated timber industry might have managed if it had been permitted to hire thousands to harvest the dead trees of the last six years, thus providing jobs, timber, and forest safety. Instead, the summer perfect storm created a sort of green napalm—a combustible fuel of unharvested timber that would turn a traditional wildfire into an uncontrollable inferno, burn over four million acres, and send one hundred million metric tons of carbon emissions into the air. Due to the tremendous temperatures created by the infernos, eerie pyrocumulus clouds for weeks dotted the Sierra Nevada skyline, in apocalyptical fashion emulating the mushroom clouds that billow up after nuclear blasts. The ensuing smoke clouds soon covered much of the state and overwhelmed the efficacy of public and private solar farms, which in turn led to rolling scheduled power outages. And the power crisis had been made worse by the voluntary state shutdown of clean-burning natural gas and nuclear power plants—all exacerbated by near-record temperatures in some areas of the state reaching 110 degrees.

Now the sun is wide awake, baring its teeth, making the sweat run down people's back. Before it will make its way across the sky and into the waiting arms of the Arabian Sea, so much will have happened: migrations into the city, births, marriages, dowry deaths, illicit love affairs, pay raises, first kisses, bankruptcy filings, traffic accidents, business deals, money changing hands, plant shutdowns, gallery openings, poetry readings, political discussions, evictions. Every event in human history will repeat itself today. Everything that ever happened will happen again today. All if life lived in a day. A day, a day. A silver urn of promise and hope. Another chance. At reinvention, at resurrection, at reincarnation. A day. The least and most of all of our lives.

In the transcripts, he described how the accident took place because of a “routine safety test.” Because the test put the reactor in a highly unstable state, Anatoly Diatlov, the second chief engineer at the plant, told two operators (both would die a few weeks later in Hospital No. 6) to turn off the reactor’s alarm system. They did and then proceeded to manually slow down the reactor to see if the turbines would generate electricity with the reactor coasting to a stop. Once they finished the test, Diatlov gave the order to activate the SCRAM button for a complete shutdown. Five seconds later the reactor blew.

Neither of the two biggest causes he has invested in over the years—reducing tobacco use and improving traffic safety—register much in the glittery precincts of philanthropy, but Bloomberg has picked two real winners. Smoking kills six million people worldwide every year, which is far more than AIDS and malaria put together. That number is projected to rise to eight million by 2030. A funder who bends this curve even slightly can save untold lives, which is why Bloomberg has so far poured at least $600 million into the cause. The same goes for road safety, where the body count is also huge: 1.25 million people die annually from accidents and tens of millions are injured. His foundation estimates that some 125,000 lives will be saved as a result of Bloomberg’s investment of more than a quarter of a billion dollars in road safety activities across the world. Sounds like a bargain, right? Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s quest to shut down coal-fired power plants—a cause to which he’s now given over $130 million—is a twofer: shuttering such plants reduces carbon dioxide emissions but also lowers old-fashioned air pollution, saving lives. In early 2015, Bloomberg estimated that 5,500 lives annually were already being saved because of coal plant shutdowns in recent years.